A High School Diploma Just Doesn’t Cut It

A high-school degree isn’t enough to launch most workers into a lifetime of solid earnings, according to research out this week.

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The conclusion is no surprise to James Hayes, chief executive of Hayes Cos., a Pineville, La., maker of metal parts. The energy boom is driving business at the family-owned manufacturer, which makes parts for equipment in the oil and gas industry, as well as for train tank cars and other purposes. Hayes Cos. is having a hard time hiring enough workers to keep up with demand, he said. The shortage could be alleviated, Mr. Hayes said, if students graduated from high school better prepared to enter the work force.

“I guess the culture that we’ve had in the U.S. was… if you don’t go to college, you’re a failure,” Mr. Hayes said. “Some of these kids, if they just knew [they weren’t college-bound] before they got out of high school, they could start learning things for a trade.”

His company is training such workers—and also is relying on Louisiana state programs that are preparing students for jobs. College isn’t for everyone, and students who don’t plan on higher education would be better served by targeted training, he said.

“The kids could learn how to be welders, machinists and all the things that we need in manufacturing,” Mr. Hayes said. Many “schools are still training these kids for college courses…The problem is that that’s not the right thing. If you’re going to be a welder or a fitter, you need to know geometry, how to figure the circumference of a circle so you can fit this pipe… They don’t know how learning these skills, maths and sciences and geometry… can really help them.”

Mr. Hayes pointed out that such training would direct high-school students who aren’t planning on college to a solid career path — and one not hobbled by student-loan debt. “We’ve got qualified welders and fitters making $60,000 and $70,000 a year and they don’t owe a dime,” he said.

The Fourth Federal Reserve District, which includes Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, is a former industrial center that has shed many of the manufacturing jobs once held by workers with a high-school education.

Workers without a college degree make up a large portion of the area’s population, Ms. Richter said, and “we wanted to see what their prospects were.”

She and Ms. Nelson found that “a college degree does not necessarily lead to higher wages; training and occupation choices also matter. In 2011, the top 30% of earners with a high-school degree earned more than what 50% of workers with an Associate’s degree earned. The same top-earning group of high-school-degree workers also made more than a quarter of workers with bachelor’s degrees.”

The authors still emphasized the importance of higher education not only to raising one’s earning power, but to spurring an area’s greater economic fortune. “Increasing the number of college graduates is undeniably desirable for the economic health of a region; it is also important to make sure that every high-school student graduates with strong analytical and soft skills,” they wrote.

“For Millennials, the only thing more expensive than going to college is not going to college,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president, special projects, at the Pew Research Center and an author of the paper.

The key driver of the increased income gap isn’t that today’s young college graduates are doing better than ones in generations past, Mr. Taylor said. “It’s really that today’s young adults who didn’t go beyond high school are doing much worse than their similarly educated counterparts” in earlier generations.

Even young people who had to borrow to pay for college are more satisfied with their career progress and prospects than high-school graduates without debt, Mr. Taylor said. The Pew survey seems “an affirmation that the group that went to college thinks it has been a good investment.”

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